‘Law & Order True Crime’ Season 1, Episode 6: The Sons Speak

‘The Menendez Murders’ Episode 6

As I write, this week’s episode of “The Menendez Murders” has come to an end, the 11 o’clock local news has just begun, and the coverage is dominated by the terrorist attack in downtown Manhattan. And as my colleagues and their subjects try to sift the facts of what happened from hearsay, their conversations return inevitably to motive — Why did this person do this? — and, sometimes, despondence — How can any person do this?

And yet, over and over, people do.

It’s the nature of all violent crime to give us some measure of existential pause, but some are of such brutality or scale as to defy whole belief systems. The real-life murders of José and Kitty Menendez on which this series is based possessed exactly such brutality. Two young men who seem to have everything they could desire are not supposed to murder their mother or father. And they aren’t supposed do it with shotguns at point blank range.

And yet, over and over, Erik and Lyle did.

How you feel about that fact will mostly likely depend on which crime you think was greater: the murders themselves, or the alleged abuse that might have led them to those murders. This week’s episode, which brought us through the closing arguments, was the best of the series so far, in part because it finished establishing the terms of the debate in their most naked, unequivocal form. We’ve been building to this since the beginning. Like the jury, we ostensibly have what we need.

On one side, you have two grisly murders. Pamela Bozanich’s decision to begin her closing statement to the jury by pinning up the crime scene photographs was a bet that the crime’s utter gruesomeness would do half the heavy lifting. “This is why we’re here,” she says, pointing to the images. “We’re not here to try José and Kitty Menendez for being bad parents.”

This is network TV, and those photos aren’t as gory as they would have been in real life (or if they are, the camera doesn’t zoom in or linger), so the effect of her visual argument is necessarily diminished. So, too, is the effect of the flashbacks to the murders, which were given their fullest, most harrowing (and best) treatment thus far. A description of the crime scene from an article written by Robert Rand for Playboy, in 1991, begins to approximate the effect those photos might have had, if just barely:

It was a slaughter of a ferocity rarely seen outside of war. The killers chose to stand in place, on a parquet floor suddenly awash in human tissue and blood, pumping shot after shot into the helpless couple. Five blasts hit Jose. In addition to the point-blank shot to the back of his head, he was struck in the chest, right arm, left elbow and left thigh. In the language of the autopsy, his brain had been “predominantly eviscerated” by “explosive decapitation.”

As for the mother, Rand continues, she was “all but torn apart by nine shots.” Her face, he adds, was “an unrecognizable, gelatinous mess.”

On the other side, however, there are two lifetimes’ worth of abuse — the alleged sexual molestation and violence at the hands of the father, and the blame, complicity and more sexual abuse at the hands of the mother. Most of the episode was dedicated to Lyle’s and Erik’s testimony on the stand about the abuse, and it was riveting. What’s more their original testimony (there’s a decent edit, with some valuable commentary here, and another here) was replicated here almost word-for-word in places, edited mostly for time — but decidedly not for effect. That’s a credit to the production and to the reality: Both are profoundly moving.

Little need to recap the abuse accusations in great detail here, but suffice to say, they were horrible and extensive. And there were surprises, particularly from Lyle, whose hard exterior irreparably crumbles on the stand. The actor Miles Gaston Villanueva does a wonderful job coaxing a lifetime of pain to the surface, where it erupts into sobs of shame and contrition. There’s little anger, just as in the real-life testimony. He’s too weakened up there on the stand. This is a broken person who, despite years of torture, never stopped craving his father’s love, or admiring him.

Lyle also bears the irrational guilt of having failed for years to protect his little brother. He also, we learn, carries the regret of having passed along that abuse (briefly, it seems) as a child, subjecting Erik to some of the same “object sessions” his father forced upon him. “Erik, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” he cries, a pleading heap of tears.

Erik, who thus far has been the more outwardly fragile one, finds resolve on the stand. He has surprises, too. His father, he says, held a knife to his throat when he tried to fight back. By the time Erik was 12, he says, his father was actively hurting him, sticking him with needles.

Each time they fight back, the father’s response is the same: If you tell, I’ll kill you. Each time they plead for help from their mother, her response is the same: It’s your fault, and you’re ruining this family.

From there, the testimony turns to the period just before the murders, as the defense seeks to establish the boys’ fear of being killed by José. The boys are fully grown now, but the abuse hasn’t stopped for Erik, and they’ve had enough. They describe their mounting paranoia after they threatened to expose their father. They bought guns. They bought ammo. They stashed it all in the car. There was no plan, they say, and the night of the murders they had merely wanted to go to a movie. But things spun quickly out of control. “I thought they were armed,” Lyle says. “I thought they had made a plan and were in the process of killing us.”

The prosecution thinks the boys are acting. Worse, they think the boys are greedy. (“Erik was afraid, all right,” the prosecutor Lester Kuriyama, played by Keong Sim, says. “Afraid he’d have to get up off his butt and work like everyone else.”) This series has had an unmistakable point of view all along, and television is a powerful medium. So I encourage readers to supplement last night’s episode with a viewing of the original testimony. How you interpret it may depend on which of your beliefs you’re unwilling to upend. I know which interpretation of the murders helps me sleep at night. And with crimes of this brutality, that’s a rare luxury.

Let the Record Reflect:

Robert Rand, the journalist I cited above, was also an adviser on this series. We’ve been in touch lately by Twitter and email, and he has answered some of the questions I posed last time, and corrected some assumptions. The boys did play a board game together in their holding cell, but it was Axis and Allies, not Risk. The detectives did, indeed, take witnesses to strip clubs. Wow.

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